Features

Under the tracery and flaring supports of the Eiffel Tower, there’s a dining room and a fainting couch on the Berkeley Rep Thrust Stage: Kent Dorsey’s design. 

All stands ready for the mayhem of a Feydeau farce to break out, but first we are addressed by a shambling, professorial older man who introduces himself as Barrington Regent, Eugene Ionesco professor of Philology and Semiotics at Cal State Yreka. 

Some prefatory remarks about the playwright’s late conjugal comedies, as opposed to the more familiar “door-slammers” like A Flea in Her Ear seem in order, but order degenerates as the introductory speaker’s broad, friendly grin becomes an open-mouthed leer while he explains, “The English for ‘farceur’—is farceur. You can look it up. So good to be back in Berkeley—among the intel-li-ghen-zia—which is a Russian word!” 

The entrance of Geoff Hoyle, featured performer (as Bastien Follavoine) and adapter of For Better or Worse (based on From Marriage to Divorce, a projected collection of five conjugal comedies), is delayed, upstaged, by Geoff Hoyle, indecent docent. 

Geoff’s interruption of the start of the play, in order to trip himself up, also gives Berkeley Rep a chance to rib itself, and subscription drives in general. The gags are witty, but how many in the audience took them seriously? Like a parody donation request, buried in a mound of junk mail, a target audience may be hard not to hit. 

But it’s all in good fun, something the comic action that follows isn’t always. Post-comic may be a better term for the kind of farce Geoff’s adapted from these late plays with a bitter taste. As he quotes in his program note from Marcel Achard’s tart description, “Strindberg through a distorting fairground mirror.” 

Strindberg himself, and his successors, up through O’Neill and Pinter, had a strange, deadpan humor running through the disasters of the text that often doesn’t translate in stage production. In trying “to keep the bitter realism underlying these pungent comedies” in order to get “modernity with the period setting” for “something to play with, something slightly outrageous, unsettling and hilarious,” this clown-turned-adaptor’s in ambitious pursuit of an elusive goal. 

It’s expressed in a melange of comic styles, from pantomime that approaches slapstick, to burlesque mugging, to the more elegant rhythms of boulevard farce. There’s often a Manneristic relation between the performers’ styles in David Ira Goldstein’s staging that seems to stem from the funhouse mirror effect in Achard’s description: a trick of perspective seen from another angle, the viewpoint of another character—torqued gestures and expressions of the most banal domestic events to realize a sometimes grotesque humor—what, as Pirandello said, “you find instead of what you expect to find.”  

The cast’s an able one, up to the job. Act one, “Julie’s Early” (supertitles on the Eiffel Tower) opens with Bastien pacing his super-pregnant-but-prematurely ready to deliver wife Julie (Sharon Lockwood), holding her hand, walking her, trying to fit a chair behind her. Bastien is the put-upon, clueless straight man husband. The routines are funny, sometimes hilarious. The maid (sprightly Amy Resnick) whisks in and out, the statuesque mother-in-law (Lynda Ferguson, all manic, deadpan business) arrives in monumental dress and a hat surmounted by wings and sweeping tailfeathers. The expectant parents quibble about everything under the sun in a stream of verbal play. “Is that all you can talk about on the day you’re to be a father?” Waiting for the most important entrance, which doesn’t come, they urge Bastien to don the chamberpot of the little boy they expect—from a dream of Bastien at the racetrack, wearing the pot and inaugurating a new fashion! The silliness escalates into a crazy tableau of “motherhood, mayhem and mutilation”--as Prof. Regent puts it. 

The second act, after the Professor puts some “volunteers” he drafts through a demonstration “door-slammer,” with hilariously improvised results, is “Purging Baby.” 

Zig-zagging between Bastien’s attempt to ingratiate M. Chouilloux (Jarion Monroe, with stopwatch farceur timing), through whom he hopes to sell a military issue of chamberpots, and Julie’s attempts to administer a laxative to their resistant boy, Toto (Gideon Lazarus and Austin Greene, alternately), complicated by the arrival of adulterous Mme. Chouilloux (Lynnda Ferguson again, just as extravagantly got-up) and her “cousin,” Horatio Garcia Zarzuela de Zaragoza y Pau (Rudy Guerrero), the accident proceeds in due course to the intersection of all the comic vehicles, under the prescient eyes of little Toto, and to the crashing of demolished chamberpots, scurrying laxative-bibbers and a general retreat. The madness goes stratispheric. 

Hoyle’s grand experiment has mixed results; he should pursue it further or look into some other European humorists (Pirandello, Valle-Inclan, Adamov) who mix it up. Sometimes the mix of burlesque and farce click (especially between Geoff and Monroe). Other times, lacking the rhythms of the French original, it bottoms out as just old slapstick routines or, in the pas-de-deux with Sharon Lockwood, a little too Punch ‘n Judy. Fawlty Towers may be an inspiration, but Hoyle’s after bigger game yet—I’m sure Prof. Regent will soon be explaining it to us again, in the most maddeningly informative detail. 

For Better of Worse plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison St., through April 24. 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org.